this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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So, Google is clearly paying lots of money directly to maintain their lead in the search engine market.
Bad look for Apple as well. They say they take privacy seriously, but are selling their user's data to Google, one of the last companies you would want getting your information if you were concerned about privacy.
Selling their user data to Google? They're putting Google as the default search engine, but users are free to change it. I don't understand how that's the same. People would probably set it to Google anyway these days, which is a shame because Kagi is the best search engine.
Apple does make a big deal about having sensible and secure defaults. This is the issue
They are receiving billions so that their users use Google search - why is this a question?
No. That would be if they set up Apple Search and sent some or all of the resulting data to Google.
This is much worse. They don't have to do any work, and so they have no control over what data their devices give Google.
I’d prefer something more secure but all of them just suck. I use DDG but more than half the time I end up needing to use !g to get the google results because DDG just isn’t that good.
I really wonder how people making such claims use it. I'm a dev and have to search daily and constantly and hardly ever don't I find something and when I don't, the Google bang doesn't help either.
But maybe DDG just works well for technical stuff.?
If I’m searching for something very specific, I’m generally searching a site I already know will have the answer. So if I’m looking for how to do something with code or devops tools, I to limit my search to stackoverflow or another forum first, or the respective sites for their documentation.
For all of that, DDG works perfectly. And that’s what I use it for most of the time. I will use it to search within sites a ton. Like if I want to get information about a person, event, whatever, I’ll search Wikipedia first and dive through the article and sources there.
Where it tends to fail, and it could be my own fault, is just general searches where I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for. Google is better at interpreting what I’m searching for and returning relevant results. DDG is like “here’s your results retard, search better next time”.
DDG is also a for profit venture and uses privacy more as a marketing ploy. They’ve been caught allowing Microsoft trackers.
That was their browser though and you shouldn't use a Chromium based browser anyway if you value privacy (and the future of the web for that matter).
Yeah, you have to be wary of whatever online service you use. I don't really trust DDG but I trust the alternatives less.
Ive been using bing and bing copilot more and more for general stuff these last few months. Google needs to up their game. Other than that I use ddg as my first point of call
DDG largely uses the Bing API anyway so there’s no reason to use Bing itself over DDG. Bing is as bad or worse than Google for privacy.
I’m going to keep using DDG just out of principle and hope that their own crawler continues to get up to speed. They’ve definitely gotten better over the years but still leave a lot to be desired for search.
Fucking lol.
?
Just arbitrarily mentioning kagi is the best when there are tons of better options.
Are there any other options for paid ad-free search engines besides Brave Search?
I like Kagi, a lot, I've used it since I first heard about it months ago. But I worry how willing people will be to pay for search. I hope it continues to improve long term because it's a great service. I don't plan to use anything else.
The pricing is just... challenging. I'm not going to pay $20 per month for my family to switch search engines.
I'm with you on that. I'm also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.
But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren't online, or are in a place where Google isn't the default, or don't make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.
Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we're not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?
I'm not balking at the idea of paying, I'm balking at the specific pricing. I understand that Google makes more than that but Kagi's goal can't be to be one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
Honestly I would love if they did something like per-search pricing where you can set a monthly limit rather than paying for either 300 searches or unlimited.
They sell not data, but users, like a youtuber of mil. subscribers sells their userbase to Black Surfshark Online. Exclusive, if limited, access, exposure. If Apple happened to pick anything else as a default search engine, the majority wouldn't even mind. And they could've done even worse if they put unique ID to every search queue like Edge, Yandex do.
Fuck Google and fuck Kagi.
I use DuckDuck Go.
DDG is bing, and it's not very great. The only way to not be a product is to pay for the product you use, otherwise the money has to come from somewhere.
What did Kagi do to you?
Only idiots think Apple is privacy friendly lol.
I don't link to news sites, but if you look up Apple Let Contractors Listen To Private Voice Recordings you'll see that in 2019 they were sending voice clips to contractors.
Apple has everyone fooled. They act like they are so privacy focused because they do processing locally on your device instead of in the cloud, which means nothing. Google also has been moving a vast majority of things to local processing on their Pixel devices for years now. Is Google now privacy focused?
Apple are privacy-focused insofar as they will privately sell your data, sneakily.
They had a big billboard in LA that said "Apple knows privacy" or some shit.
I guarantee all of them ate that up without a second thought.
Aren't almost all (at least photo editing ones) new Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro features in the cloud? What things do you mean when you say Google is moving to local processing?
IOS is closed source and doesn’t allow side loading, it shouldn’t be considered in privacy discussions
Why not? Isn't apple able to push whatever they want to user's phones without their permission, like they were paid to do with the U2 album?
I mean that it can’t be considered secure or privacy focused
Yeah, correcting those types of typos on mobile is a pain in the ass, haha.
My guy, there are plenty worse companies than Google to have your data. Let's not get too hyperbolic.
It could always be worse. But that's a bad excuse.
No, you're right. That's not a good excuse but being overly dramatic over it doesn't really do anything productive either. At the end of the day it's just a default option that can easily be changed. Not really a conspiracy by Google and Apple to steal your personal data.
The issue with Google is the scale of the data they can collect and their ability to use that data. Between Chrome, Search, Android, Waymo, Google Fi, etc they have a lot of ways to gather and use data on users.
And Google VPN.
Google's entire recent business direction seems to be "protect your data from everyone else so our copy of your data is worth more".
Also add Google Maps and Gmail to the list.
Nah, there's only one Apple user, she just posts a lot online under pseudonyms and buys a continuous stream of products.
Oh no my gmail address already sold. My mailbox, my searches :'(